Roman Toilets Along Hadrian's Wall

Romanus Litrinis in Britannia

The outer fringe of the Roman Empire crossed
the narrowest part of Britain just south
of the Pictish lands, in today's northern England
just south of the Scottish border.
The Emperor Hadrian commanded the construction of a wall
across this narrow point of Britain starting in 122 CE.
Today's Britain was Roman Britannia,
but only up to the point where the Roman legions could
beat back the Picts coming south out of Scotland.
The Emperor Hadrian had his wall built from coast to coast
to fortify his northern border.

The massive construction project took six years, 122-128 AD,
and involved the moving of an estimated 2,000,000 cubic
yards of earth.
This was the largest engineering project undertaken
by the Romans.

A ditch (3m deep, 9m wide) was dug immediately in front
of the wall, and the earth formed into a rounded hump
beyond that.
The wall itself was built of stone blocks.

There was a gate every Roman mile (1480 meters,
or 0.9196 statue miles).
A small fort called a milecastle guarded the gate.
Then between each pair of milecastles were two observation
turrets — there was an outpost every 494 meters, at
least on average.

The practical implementation shifted the milecastles up to
200 meters either direction to better utilize features of
the landscape or to support visual signalling to the
Stanegate series of forts to the south of the wall.

Larger forts like Vercovicium were widely spaced along
the wall, on its south side or up to a few hundred meters
to its south.

The wall itself was constructed from locally
available material — squared stone east of the
River Irthing and turf to its west.
The stone section would be three meters wide and
five to six meters tall.
The turf section would be six meters wide and 3.5 meters tall.
On the north side of the wall would be first a ditch and then
a berm, at least in the places where the local topology
supported this cross-section.

Here you see the Imperial Roman toilets at
Vercovicium Fort,
a part of Hadrian's Wall
in Northumberland, England.

Three Roman legions were involved in the construction,
the Second, Sixth and Twentieth Legions.
They left their inscriptions in the turrets and milecastles,
and this shows that the three legions each used their own
unique slightly different designs.

The wall was mostly complete in AD 128,
after about six years of construction.

These Imperial Roman toilets are at Vercovicium Fort,
now known by the modern English name of Housesteads Roman
Fort.
It is between milecastles 36 and 37 along
Hadrian's Wall.
These are the latrines for the fort's military garrison.

Vercovicium was garrisoned by a double-sized auxilliary
infantry cohort plus a detachment of legionaries from
Legio II Augusta.

In the 3rd century, it was garrisoned by
Cohors I Tungrorum, along with the
Numerus Hnaudifridi
and the
Cuneus Frisiorum.

In the 4th century, the Tungrians remained, according to the
Notitia Dignitatum.
But by 409 AD, the Romans were gone.

Somewhere in the early 400s the Roman administration faded
away and the communities along the wall either became fully
self-sustaining or faded away.
They hadn't really been all that "Roman" for some time,
with the military and administrators recruited locally
for many generations.

More Roman plumbing can be seen at Vindolanda Fort,
an auxilliary fort or castrum
a short distance south of Vercovicium
guarding the Stanegate road from the Solway Firth to the
mouth of the River Tyne.
These are at the public baths.

The earliest fortifications here were wood and turf.
The first was built about 85 AD.
The 1st Cohort of Tungrians probably built that one.
By about 95 AD the 9th Cohort of Batavians, a unit of
about 1,000, had replaced that with a timber fort.
The Batavians left in 105 AD and their fort was demolished.
Back came the Tungrians, who built a larger wooden fort.
Then, with the Wall's construction starting in 122,
this fort's men were moved north to the wall.
A stone fort was built here, possibly manned by the
2nd Cohort of Nervians.

The Fourth Cohort of Gauls manned Vindolanda fort
starting in the early third century.
Historians initially assumed that this was just a
nominal designation for a group of locally recruited
auxilliary troops.
However, an inscription was recently found:

CIVES GALLI DE GALLIAE CONCRDES QUE BRITANNI

The troops from Gaul dedicate this statue to the
goddess Gallia with the full support of
the British-born troops.

This indicates that the Fourth Cohort of Gauls really
contained native Gauls who wanted to distinguish themselves
from the local British recruits.
The ruins of Vindolanda were occupied for several
centuries after the gradual departure (or
assimilation) of the Romans.

In 1973, the Vindolanda Tablets were discovered.
They are the oldest surviving handwritten documents found in
Britain, and provide the best view of life along Hadrian's
Wall.
They are the earliest known examples of the use of Roman
ink writing.
They date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, showing that there
was a high degree of literacy in the Roman army and revealing
details of the professional and personal lives of the
administrators.
There are official notes about Vindolanda fort business,
and personal notes from the officers and their households.
The largest single group of tablets is the correspondence
of the prefect of the 9th Cohort of Batavians,
Falvius Cerialis, and of his wife, Sulpicia Lepidina.

The nearly 500 tablets are thin sheets of wood.
Various attributes show that the birch, alder and oak
wood was grown locally.
The tablets about 0.25 mm to 3 mm thick,
typically about 20×8 cm in size,
the size of a postcard.
They were scored down the center and folded, forming
diptychs with the writing on the inner faces.

They were thought to be just wood shavings until an
excavator peeled apart two that were stuck together and
saw writing on the inner faces.
The ink was made from carbon, gum arabic and water.
The tablets had been preserved by being in an anaerobic
water-saturated environment.
The newly exposed wood very quickly oxidized and
rendered the tablet faces black and unreadable,
at least to human vision.

Infra-red and multi-spectral imaging allows the writing
to be seen and transcribed.
The tablets were initially undecipherable, until researchers
realized that they were written in forms of cursive script
using an alphabet different from the Latin
capitals used for inscriptions.
The precise writing style varies from author to author.
You can now
view the Vindolanda Tablets online.

Economic decline and military coups reduced Roman stability
in the late 4th century, and outside pressure greatly
reduced Imperial control of Britain.
The men from Rome left, but a Roman influence
remained and then gradually faded into the local society.
The Roman administration had gradually left by 410 AD,
taking the Roman Legions with it.

The increasingly local-based garrisons were left to provide
their own defense and govern themselves.
Some parts of the wall defenses were occupied well into
the 5th century.

Enough of the wall survived in the 8th century for the
Venerable Bede to describe the wall in his
Historia Ecclesiastica.

The wall was largely disassembled to re-use the stone to
build local structures.
In the 1700s, General Wade disassembled long sections
of it to build the military road which now mostly lies
underneath the B6318 highway.
A man named John Clayton was trained as a lawyer and became
town clerk of Newcastle in the 1830s.
Much of what we can see today is thanks to his purchase of
land for the preservation of the wall and forts on it,
starting in 1834.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote
a series of short stories
about a Roman legionary named Narnesius who defended Hadrian's
Wall against both Picts and Vikings.
These stories increased public awareness of and interest
in the wall.

Europeans didn't have toilet paper until recently.
The Romans, at least the higher classes, used a
tersorium, a sponge mounted on a stick.
The sponge could be dipped into a water channel running
in front of the row of communal toilets in the latrine,
and rinsed off in that channel after use.
If there was no channel of running water, a bucket of
salt water or vinegar water would be used, as Seneca
described in his Letters of Lucillus [70,20].

Arms dealer [displaying a cuirass]:
And what, alack, shall I do with this rounded cuirass,
a beautiful fit, worth ten minas?

Trygaeus:
Well, that one will not make a loss for you, anyway.
Give me that at cost price.
It will be very convenient to crap in ...

Arms dealer:
Stop this impudent mockery of my goods!

Trygaeus [placing the cuirass on the ground like a
chamber pot and squatting on it]:
Like this, if you put three stones beside it.
Is it not clever?

If neither a tersorium nor water were available,
the Greeks and Romans used
πεσσοι or
pessoi, small stones.
The tradition started with the ancient Greeks that
three stones should be enough to finish the job.
This convention has been very long lived, with a
hādīth attributed to Muhammad
specifying three stones as the ideal number for anal cleaning.
The pessoi were also used in an ancient board game in Greece.
Aristophanes wrote a scene involving pessoi in Peace
in the 5th century.
Here's the Penguin Classics translation:

Where next?

The Greeks would use
όστρακα or
ostraka, small pieces of broken
ceramic goods, to vote to shun or ban their opponents.
This is where we get the word ostracize.
Some scholars have suggested that the ostraka could be
used as pessoi, literally wiping your feces onto the
names of hated individuals.
The abrasive characteristics of broken ceramic material
suggest that long-term used of these as pessoi could have
resulted in localized irritation at the least, progressing
to skin or mucosal damage or the irritation of external
hemorrhoids.
For more on toilet use of pessoi and ostraka and the
medical implications
see the paper
"Toilet hygiene in the classical era",
Philippe Charlier, Luc Brun, Clarisse Prêtre,
and Isabelle Huynh-Charlier, in
BMJ (the British Medical Journal)
2012;p345-346.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.